


The Discovery of a World in the Moone

by cheese (youreanoodlemrbarrow)



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: (gerard and frank are like one year apart), (maybe real maybe not), (not quite), Aliens, Alternate Universe - College/University, Artist Gerard Way, M/M, frank is a nerd, im not good at drama tbh so this shouldnt be stressful to read, unrealistic idea of the foster system, wrong age difference
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-20
Updated: 2016-04-23
Packaged: 2018-05-27 21:54:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6301792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youreanoodlemrbarrow/pseuds/cheese
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gerard dropped out of art school because his teachers didn't like his work, and the obvious reaction to that is creating something so awesome they will regret having been so blind.</p>
<p>Frank thinks the universe is pretty cool, and he's also really /weird/.</p>
<p>They meet in the library at the beginning of summer and oh boy they're in for a wild ride</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Do Starfish Even Care

**Author's Note:**

> I have an outline for this fic, so I promise I will try to finish it. I promise.
> 
> In this first chapter there is no Frank whatsoever, sorry about that, but he /will/ be in the next one so maybe bear with me. Thanks.

Gerard hadn’t been kicked out of art school, thank you very much. He had made the operative decision to stop trying to please his professors, since they clearly didn’t agree with his artistic vision on anything at all.

He didn’t regret dropping out, mostly: he was well aware that spending money for getting his work rejected and generally not appreciated wasn’t really smart or productive. Granted, Gerard wasn’t the smartest or most productive guy you could meet (he was actually very much closer to the bottom of the list), but in this one instance it was nearly impossible to avoid doin the right thing.  
He didn’t really feel comfortable making a wise decision, it was definitely out of character for him, but he figured everything would be okay if only he could manage to balance it out with an adequate number or foolish stunts and impulsive choices.

 

 

 

Now, a week after the end of classes, Gerard felt he was at a nice point in ruining his Decent Person Impression or whatever; he was currently lying on his unmade, cluttered bed, thinking hard about how to get his parents off his case.  
Thing is, he hadn’t considered how him not being in school anymore was intimately related to him having to work. Of course it was fairly obvious _now_ , but the realization hadn’t crossed his brain until a split second after he had handed in the papers granting his freedom from the hell that was art school, and then it was too late. He could do nothing but stare helplessly as the ancient secretary stapled and signed and put official-looking stamps on the documents that doomed Gerard to finding an occupation.

Gerard’s mom wasn’t nearly as much of a fool as her eldest son: she knew full well what he was getting into, and _precisely_ for that reason she avoided mentioning anything about he was going to be expected to find a way to earn money from then on.   
She knew him quite well, with having given birth to him and all that, and she was aware that Gerard was absolutely likely to reconsider dropping out if it meant having to find a job; but she also knew how miserable art school made him, which explains why it was in Donna Way’s interests to keep her first kid in the dark for a little while.

Gerard groaned and flipped over, now staring at his comic books and graphic novels bookshelf, melting into the mattress and idly wondering if starfish spent their life facing up or down, and if they even cared at all.  
After a good fifteen minutes of heated debate with himself he decided  that they probably didn’t. He sure wouldn’t have cared, and he could think of no reason for mollusks to disagree with him.

The stairs leading to Gerard’s basement bedroom creaked, alerting him of his little brother’s arrival. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, as they lived in the same house and spent most of the time together, but the timing was excellent.  
Gerard sat up and zeroed his gaze on one of the mugs Mikey was carrying (on the pink mug with the cat, on his own mug, on the mug nobody else but him was allowed to use), not acknowledging him until he had gulped down half of the coffee he was brought.

Even then he refrained from greeting his caffeine-carrying savior. He and Mikey were both convinced that ‘goodmorning’ was a lame thing to say, especially as they never woke up before 2 p.m. if they could avoid it. Not that clocks measured anything real, obviously, Gerard found himself explaining to everyone who would listen: time is an illusion, and mornings doubly so. Whatever.

 

Instead, the first words that left his mouth that day were on a more pressing subject.   
“Are starfish mollusks, you think?,” he pondered out loud, “They don’t have shells or anything, so maybe they aren’t. But they also don’t have bones, which is pretty neat of them.”

“Echinodermata, man,” Mikey answered in a beat, “like sea urchins.”

Gerard made a face at the thought of sea urchins: the fuckers were spikey and they _did_ have a skeleton, and for some reason he didn’t trust them at all.  
His mistrust of sea-dwelling creatures was admittedly not a big problem in Gerard’s life, as he hadn’t stepped foot in saltwater since he was like ten, but he didn’t let that stop him from lecturing his long-suffering little brother on how he was absolutely certain sea urchins were hiding something.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Gerard loved not having anything to do: he found it impossible to wrap his head around people who felt discomfort at not having a routine, or tasks to complete every single day.  
He thrived in having hours and hours to fill however he fancied, and that was the main reason why he despised being reminded that he was supposed to find a job; it’s not that he was against the idea of earning money (who was?), but he was fairly certain he wouldn’t survive any of the summer gigs available in the area.

The main beef Gerard had with them was the fact that all of the positions he could hope to fill involved being in contact with the public, and being in contact with the public didn’t typically go well (either for him _or_  for the unfortunate souls who crossed his path. He was always swinging between being too shy, too sarcastic, or simply too bored, and his face betrayed every single one of those feelings).

Gerard’s ideal job was something he could do in the privacy of his own home, something he enjoyed, something without a fixed schedule (fixed schedules were _evil_ ), something like drawing comics.  
He _did_ go to art school for a reason, after all.  
What he needed to do now, he figured, was convincing his parents to let him focus on making art for a while, possibly refraining from nagging him about having overheard there was _a lack of cashiers at the grocery store, Gerard, isn’t that just perfect?_

 

It wasn’t just laziness on his part. He wished it was. Gerard tried to give people the impression that he was just an idle fucker who hated the idea of waking up early or whatever the hell, but that wasn’t the whole truth.  
He was actually rather anxious and not too confident on his intrapersonal skills, courtesy of years of bullying in school, and making a fool of himself in public was hardly something he looked forward to doing daily. His mental health was already less than excellent, he knew, and being humiliated by strangers couldn’t possibly improve it.

Mikey knew about it, Mikey knew more about Gerard than _Gerard_ knew about Gerard, but he had agreed a while ago not to tell their parents about his brother’s issues.  
He did believe that some therapy wouldn’t have gone amiss, but he respected Gerard’s wish to keep this kind of stuff between the two of them… with the caveat that he he _was_ ready to go talk to their mom if things got worse, _ok Gee? Just watch me_.

 

 

With Mikey’s help, Gerard managed to craft and recite a convincing I-Need-To-Focus-On-My-Art speech to Donna.  
He was surprised at how easily she agreed to a decent compromise: Gerard was allowed to spend his time preparing a portfolio, but if by September he still hadn’t found an occupation that he deemed suitable, _then_ he would have to suck it up and start sending applications to any local business looking for employees.

Gerard and his mother shook on it, Mikey solemnly looking at their joined hands in virtue of his role as a witness (Donna wasn’t going to take any chances of the details of the agreement being twisted, so in addition to having her other son listen to the terms and conditions of the compromise, she also wrote them down and had Gerard sign the document. Again, she _knew_ him.)

 

 

 

Gerard wasn’t just trying to use the portfolio excuse to get out of working for a while: he was actually very determined to try and do something out of his life-long dedication to drawing, and also maybe attempt to get a bit of petty revenge, because revenge was kind of fun.  


He was going to write and illustrate a comic book, and not just _a_ comic book: he was going to be the author of a really great, kick-ass comic book, good enough to be shoved at his art school teachers’ faces, proving how Gerard’s style wasn’t ‘too cartoonish’, it was just cartoonish _enough_ and totally fucking awesome.  
(They were going to beg for his forgiveness and he was going to smile graciously at them and assure them that everything was forgiven.)

 

Gerard and Mikey had been collecting story ideas since the older brother had learnt how to write notes, but none of them seemed appropriate for the whole Getting-His-First-Work-Seen-By-A-Publisher business.  
It’s not that they were _bad_ ideas, the Way brothers agreed late that night while discussing the issue over the binder collecting a decade of plot bunnies, half-sketched characters and aborted storyboards; if anything, their ideas were too awesome.

  
The world wasn’t probably ready to read about a post-apocalyptic universe ruled by undead unicorn-human hybrids quite yet.

 

  
They did hope it would be soon, though.


	2. Sometimes Our 5 Year Old Selves Have Good Ideas

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am crying very hard because I want to write but I suck at it, and I suck even more at being even vaguely constant in my projects. Still.

Gerard woke up. That alone startled him for a second, because he didn’t remember ever falling asleep.  
He groaned and squinted very carefully, taking in the familiar surroundings of his room; he scanned the basement for sleeping Mikeys, but spotted none.  
What he did notice, though, was a whole bunch of papers on the floor. It wasn’t entirely unexpected by itself, since his floor was home to the most surprising of things (he once found a sandwich he had lost six months prior, and on another occasion he stumbled on a thick, dog-eared Italian grammar manual from the fifties), but these specific papers reminded him of the issue on hand.  
The comic. The plot for the comic. The comic’s plot. The comic and its plot.

He groaned again.

 

A while later, once he had gathered the necessary strength to climb the stairs and reach the kitchen, he started the coffee machine and stared at it glossy-eyed until it beeped.  
He poured the warm drink in his mug (the pink cat mug, which he had carried from the basement, he was that dedicated) and inhaled the sweet smell of caffeine, slumping on a chair by the breakfast bar.  
Gerard gazed absently around the kitchen, enjoying the peace and quiet that came with waking up mid-afternoon: his parents were still out working, and his brother tended to be even more reluctant to get up than he was.

His train of thought was derailed by an ancient drawing that was still stuck to the fridge with a tomato-shaped magnet.  
The wonky signature (right at the centre of the piece of paper, what the fuck) claimed that the piece of art had been made by GERARD WAY AGE 5 YEARS AND 8 MONTHS THANK YOU VERY MUCH.  
Gerard wondered idly why was his almost-six-years-old self’s ego so gigantic, and cringed at how much blackmail material his parents had over him.

He finished the cup of coffee, set it in the sink –how dare people imply he never helped at home?—and stood closer to the drawing he had been examining from a distance.  
It showed a weird kind of object that he inferred being a spaceship becasuse a) there was a smiling person peeking from a porthole, and b) it was surrounded by planets.

All of the planets looked like Saturn, and the person in the flying contraption sported a grand total of five hairs on their head, but Gerard refused to be too harsh on his kindergarden self.  
Before he knew it, he had a vague idea of a story to explain what was going on in the picture. Huh.

 

 

He filled another mug with the leftover coffee, placed exactly one marshmallow in the dark liquid, and headed upstairs: he had to talk to Mikey, and trying to do that without a caffeine and candy offering never ended pleasantly.

Gerard pushed the door open, and observed the uncoordinated movements Mikey deemed necessary to get himself seated on his own bed. It was not unlike witnessing a baby lamb or deer taking its first steps, Gerard thought, although he had never seen such a thing in real life (he _had_ watched a whole lot of documentaries that showed some skinny herbivore baby trying to make its way into the world, though, and they always got him kind of teary).

He handed the coffee to his brother, who was facing his direction with a very blank expression; Gerard knew Mikey was following the coffee smell more than anything, because he wasn’t wearing his glasses and that meant he literally couldn’t see farther than his nose.

He flopped on the messy bed, crossed his legs, and unceremoniously started talking about _the drawing downstairs, Mikey, you know the one on the fridge_ and his ideas for that universe and how he could absolutely see himself reaching fame with a sci-fi comic and _oh man how could we not think of this?_

Mikey blinked a few dozen times, and anyone else would have assumed his sleep-addles brain wasn’t ready for such an enthusiastic narration.  
Gerard knew better, of course, and when he stopped talking (it took a while, because he got sidetracked musing on the giant signature) he looked expectantly at the rumpled-looking boy who was holding onto his newly empty mug as if his life depended on it.

Mikey took his time answering, and even then he didn’t offer anything more than “cool”, which would have disappointed anyone but his brother, who took the comment as the high praise it was.  
Gerard beamed and left swiftly, only stumbling slightly over a record cover sitting on the floor.

 

 

Gerard spent the rest of the day in his own basement, sketching and writing down ideas, but he soon figured that, as much as he was an expert on sci-fi, he didn’t actually know anything about the real thing.  
Space was a mystery to him.

 He started asking himself ridiculous questions, at first, but he soon found out there were legitimate doubts in his mind (“If the sun is made of fire, and there is no oxygen in space, then how does it burn?”), and fuck him if he was going to write a whole comic about something he knew nothing about. That was a sure way to get his ass dragged, and he wasn’t too eager to have that happening to himself.

Gerard briefly considered googling whatever he needed to know, but then on a whim he decided that going to the library to do his research would be more old-school and kinda cool, in a very very _very_ uncool way.  


 

 

So at 3.46 the following afternoon he found himself in a previously uncharted (as far as he was concerned) area of Belleville’s library, haphazardly carrying a wobbly pile of books and trying to locate a table to sit at.

All seats were free, there seemed to be nobody else in the building except for the staff, but for some reasons all tables were right under the windows.  
Something to do with natural light, he guessed, and made a disgusted face at the thought. Who the hell would want to get sunlight anywhere near them, honestly.

But it couldn’t be helped, there wasn’t a single shady area to be seen, so he took a seat from which he could see the whole room and dumped the tomes he had picked at random from the Astronomy (523.1) section on a table.

He flipped the book on top of the pile open and skimmed the introduction. The author seemed really enthusiastic about the universe and the wonders it held, and Gerard was almost excited to start learning about the stuff.  
He loved learning new things, but only on the topics he decided were interesting and only when he decided to do so, which tended to get in the way of excellent grades, back when he was in high school. With a mental fuck you to his science teachers, he turned the pages until he found himself at the beginning of the first chapter.

His smile froze in place. He was staring right in the face of something that seemed awfully similar to an equation (or was it a logarithm?), and the ungodly mix of numbers, letters and MORE letters from a different alphabet stared back at him.

 

In shock, Gerard lifted his eyes to the small sea of tables across him, and spotted a person facing him, two tables away. The kid’s gaze was quickly averted, a fairly useless move since the sudden movement alerted Gerard that he was being looked at.

He was pretty used to being mocked, but having been out of high school for a whole year had made him forget that people were indeed that mean. In art school everyone was a weirdo in a way or the other, so bullying was not a problem; it also helped that they were all adults who had outgrown that kind of behavior anyway, thank fuck.

Gerard thought teenagers were pretty scary. He had thought that when he was a child, and his opinion on humans whose ages spanned between thirteen and eighteen hadn’t budged when he was in high school, and it had yet to change now that he was at the other side.

Teenagers still scared the living shit out of him, and being stared at by one of them gave him the chills. He refused to cower as he used to do, though, so he quickly decided to stare right back at the kid.  
Gerard took in the dorky appearance, ducked head and slight fidgeting movements, and by the time the stranger’s eyes tentatively met his, Gerard felt bad for scaring off a clearly harmless geek.  
He tried to appear reassuring by throwing a smile in the nerd’s general direction, and got back to his frankly impossibly difficult book.

He sighed and flipped through the rest of the volume, maybe hoping there would be easier bits or pictures, but no such luck.  
He was about to shut the book and shove it out of his sight, when he heard a cheerful voice in front of him, talking really fast about the globular cluster M15 in the constellation Pegasus. Or well, so it appeared anyway.

Gerard moved his head so he could look at the kid’s face, and he was sure he looked fairly bewildered, because the blabbering came to a slow stop.

Gerard couldn’t think about anything smart (or at least not utterly embarrassing) to say, so he extended his hand –making a mental note to fix his nail polish- and figured he couldn’t really do anything to fix the awkwardness of the situation, and opted for a truthful “hey, I know you’re smart and all, but I’m… well, I was, an art student, so…”

The other person (Gerard made a point of not gendering strangers) kept shaking their hand and looking confused, and he figured that maybe actually introducing himself like a normal human being could work.  
“Also, my name is Gerard, but, um, you can call me Gee if you like,” he shrugged trying to look casual.

“Frank!” the guy beamed. Huh.


End file.
